A Silicon Valley software entrepreneur and poet combines left of center political analysis with an occasional blood-curdling shriek.

September 29, 2006

Big scandal! Foley, a Republican congressman crusader against internet sexual predators on minors has turned out to be a such a predator himself. There is a smoking trail in the form of Instant Messages to adolescent boys (Congressional pages). An FBI dude on ABC sez this is solicitation of minors for sex and he'll get prison for it.

Needless to say, Foley resigned. But the fallout will be very significant.

Consider: the House leadership apparently knew about this situation for 10 or 11 months - at least. Consider: the pages were warned as a group about Foley. Consider: there are at least two pages involved. Consider: one page has said it was difficult to raise this issue because Foley had so much power. Consider: Foley is/was a member of the House leadership.

This is the Republican party, folks. These guys came to power with conservative sexual morality in their charter. It's a big chunk of what makes the rural poor folk swallow their crap. It makes the fundies froth for Bush.

It' was Republican pretensions to moral stature that fueled the whole get-Clinton-impeached fiasco. They went after him in high dudgeon. Now we see the arrogance, indifference, and abuse that was behind that carefully crafted facade - not just in Foley, but in that craven pack of enablers, the House leadership.

September 28, 2006

I remember the death bed repentance of the God Father of conservative attack strategy, one of the first to put 'thug' in Republican, Lee Atwater. It made me want to vomit. After all he had been vomiting all over the American political landscape for years, and rolling in dough and increasing in influence as a result. Atwater planted the demon seeds that resulted in Karl Rove (who was a protege). Today's Bob Herbert in the NYTimes quoted a juicy bit from his playbook, from a 1981 interview:

“You
start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger! By 1968 you can’t
say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced
busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract
now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things
you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of
them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

After he spent decades yanking the chain of working white Americans, creating racial polarization, undermining social programs, demonizing liberals, and spreading hatred and discontent, he hit a bump in the road: brain cancer. Really Bad Brain Cancer. And something changed for poor Lee: he felt the sting of conscience.

See Atwater wasn't just a dumb whitey frat boy. He certainly played one for political purposes but he had other interests. For example, he released an album called "Red, Hot And Blue" on Curb Records,
featuring himself with Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Sam Moore, Chuck
Jackson, and, B.B. King, who got co-billing with Atwater. This was when he was the national chairman of the Thug (oops, Republican) party. He'd been playing R&B since high school & in fact he was pretty good.

So on some level he knew his political schtick, his stock-in-trade, his legacy, his whole professional identity was based on a moral corruption: racism. He was living a contradiction, and when he faced death, his frat boy immorality broke down.

Before he died he issued a number of public and written apologies to individuals whom
he had attacked during his political career (including Dukakis - the famous Willie Horton smear had Atwater fingerprints). In a February 1991 article for Life Magazine, Atwater wrote:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is
what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s
were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I
acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can
acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade
for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an
evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye
with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its
ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Atwater's Republican party has taken to heart the sinister lessons of his success and has pursued them into the nether regions of what I would call treason. This so-called 'conservative' party of religious extremists and corporate lobbyists combines hustling for favors from the wealthy with awarding virtue brownie points to the religiously insecure.

But that is normal politics. What is treasonous is the hijacking of public discourse for the purpose of initiating wars of choice, manipulating intelligence, and executing policy in a manner so incompetent as to be itself criminal.

What is treasonous is to undermine the checks and balances of the American system of government in order to concentrate power in the Commander In Chief like that of a dictator and not a president.

What is treasonous is to attack democracy and the rule of law, to try to prevent voters from voting, as in Ohio and Florida.

What is treasonous is to give the Thug In Chief, oops the President, the power to torture and detain anyone (including native born citizens!) without recourse to the protections of the American legal system on nothing but the say-so of the Thug in Chief.

The Republican party has much to be ashamed of. It is a party of betrayal. After being entrusted with leadership, they have betrayed their country. The verdict of history will be harsh.

September 23, 2006

The rise of Bush I thought of at first as a terrible mistake (imagine a chorus of Screeching Supremes) but I have come to see his flaws of character as reflecting flaws in American culture and politics: 'Bush R' Us'. Racism is a central factor.

We are divided by status, class, history, identity, privilege and education. And race is a determinant in all of those. I believe that Americans have a weak belief in equality and a weak sense of community, and racism is an important factor.

The problem with having a weak sense of equality is that in leads to an idealization of and infatuation with wealth and privilege for its own sake. Bush and Ms. Paris Hilton waltz on the same cultural stage. It leads to a tolerance for treating our own people badly.

18,000 Americans die every year only because they lack health insurance, and that is a factor in the deaths of many more. 40 million lack health insurance. Prisons incarcerate armies of poor. The cost of college increasingly burdens the working and middle class. The wages of college educated 25-34 year olds has fallen 8% in only 5 years.

I think the strong reacton to 9-11 was related to symbolism: some of ours were killed by them. If we kill our own people through policies the rest of the developed world rejects, it's okay. It's like an abusive family: I'll beat up my own kids, but don't you try it, or I'll kick your a*s.

There are guys in my family who have such a fantasy identification with Bush as a dude they can 'relate to' that they don't seem to notice or care that they have no prospects, no pension, no insurance, etc. White voters look at the white power structure and see themselves. It's a mythology for suckers.

This fantasy allows a reality I call "Americans Treat Americans Like Shit." One of the divisions it rests on is that whites are unwilling to let their tax money be spent on people of color. They don't believe people of color are equal, that developing their talents will benefit America as a whole. This leads to a nation where community is in decline, infrastructure is decaying, and the middle class is shrinking.

The Democratic party has been unable to offer leadership in this area. I think the effort of trianguating whites and people of color in an uneasy coalition has exhausted their ability to find a principle and stand for it.

But that is not the only problem: Democratic leaders must make peace with an ever more predatory and short sighted American capitalism, which has taken to abandoning the American worker at every opportunity. Dems have not offered a vision of community to our racially divided nation because such a vision is of no interest to lobbyists and funders with real money.

I will be addressing these issues when I write about how the Democrats can wrestle patriotism away from the Republicans, redefining it in the process. But here is an interesting take on these issues in the Guardian. The writer is discussing various theories as to why whites vote Republican:

There is a reason why we are only talking about white
working-class voters: black people, regardless of income,
overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Indeed, were it not for black people, the
Democrats would have won the presidency only once, in 1964. That was
the year President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights act, turned
to an aide and said: "We have lost the south for a generation." We are
well into the second generation now, and the racialised politics of the
south seem to be influencing the rest of the country rather than the
other way round.

In other words there is a clear racial
attachment that white voters have to the Republican party that does not
override income but certainly qualifies it. No understanding of why so
many of them vote Republican can examine class as though it is distinct
from race.

Second, they assume a greater class attachment to the
Democrats than the party deserves. Unlike the Republicans, who openly
lobby for the class interests of their supporters and deliver on them,
Democrats do not promise substantial changes to the lives of ordinary
working people in America and rarely deliver even on the symbolic ones.

Which
brings us to the final problem. The strongest correlation between
income and voting is not whom you vote for but if you vote at all. The
more you earn, the more likely you are to turn out. According to the
census, 81.3% of those who earned $100,000 or more turned out in 2004;
the figure for those who earned less than $20,000 was 48%.

That's
because the rich have something to vote for. They have two parties; the
poor here have none. Ultimately, the question of what's the matter with
Kansas or any other state must in no small part be answered by yet
another one: what's the matter with Democrats?

September 22, 2006

What is this, that only Republicans spoke out against Bush's Freedom To Torture bill?

Democrats need to understand that if they can't stand up for their values, they will never win against Republicans on the issue of national security. How can voters trust them with national security, when they can't fight back against Republicans?!

September 20, 2006

Rosie O'Donnell has been getting flamed because in this Christian nation of ours she had the nerve to compare radical Christianity to radical Islam. I think she has a point.

Radical Christians are the most loyal constituency of Bush. Bush has chased war like a crack addict chases the pipe: with a willingness to spend everything he's got, with lies, with manipulation, with irrational destructive behaviors, with a total lack of concern wrt how his war addiction is impacting other people.

I know Christians who believe, after tens of thousands have died in Iraq, that Bush is a "good man." If you can be a "good man" after you are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, how many more will it take before you are not a "good man" anymore? Millions?

There are credible reports that this Administration is contemplating a first nuclear strike in Iran. Bush may get his chance to be the "good" killer of millions. What a grand prospect for our democracy. If you think I exaggerate about the casualties, see this.

The Scarborough show took a turn tongue-lashing Rosie. Watch it. You will see an absolute inability to reckon with the reality that as a result of our actions, tens of thousands of innocent people are dead. To the Christian supporters of Bush I say: Don't look now, but your hands are red with blood. You're not killers exactly - more like killers-lite.

September 19, 2006

I started my first blog Ich Bin Ein Iraqi because of the distress I felt at the incipient war in Iraq - I had to do something. The same factor drives me to start a this new blog today. I feel we are heading for war with Iran. The insanity of this course, and the qualms of the military, are as nothing to the fevered dreams of Bush and Cheney.

I doubt that most Americans fully grasp what we are doing in Iraq: we are the precipitator of a civil conflict killing tens of thousands of people. Probably we are biased against the foreign, the distant, the muslim. We don't grant Iraqis a full measure of humanity. And so we kill, and kill, and kill.

Of course we don't have the troops. But the 'solution' to the problem of not enough butter (army) to cover that much bread (Iran) is clear to the mad men: nuclear weapons. Matthew Yglesias has more:

Fred Kaplan wonders
if the "prepare to deploy" order that's "been sent out to U.S. Navy
submarines, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers, and two
mine-hunting ships" means we're going to war with Iran. Sam Gardiner,
former US Air Force Colonel, concludes that we are in a new report (availble in PDF)
for the Century Foundation. Gardiner says the preparations for war
"will not be a major CNN event." Instead, they "will involve the quiet
deployment of Air Force tankers to staging bases" and "additional Navy
assets moved to the region." Gardiner makes the point that while
nobody's talking about a land invasion of Iran, significant elements in
the government do have more ambitious goals than simple
surgical strikes at Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strikes are very
unlikely to actually resolve the perceived Iran issue, and there are
administration figures who've convinced themselves that a sufficiently
wide air target set will prompt regime change in Iran. One should note
that the curious thing about air power is that the professionals
involved in managing it have a longstanding, cross-national, and
incredibly pernicious habit of massively and systematically overstating
its efficacy in accomplishing all sorts of implausible things.

At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the
Craziest Goddamn Thing I've Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me
last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position
to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has
(naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The
upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade
the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the
arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80
percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of
the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes -- in
other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran
-- and then simply deny that we'd done so. Detectable radiation in the
area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they
were, after all, nuclear facilities we'd just hit.

The other night I got a call from a polling outfit trying to rank which issues were the most important to voters: Iraq, terrorism, health care, the economy. None of those, I said. My most important issue is NOT STARTING A WAR WITH IRAN.

The Democrats are always whining in shock as the Republicans use fear against them. Well here's a chance for the Dems: nationalize the upcoming election by alarming the voters that Republican victories mean another insane, incompetent, and morally catastrophic war.

The Administration countered at
first with 'We're hunting WMD's!" which (after no WMD's were found)
morphed into 'War for Democracy in the Middle-East!'

But how
much of this shameful enterprise is really a war for oil? How do the architects see this war, in
their private chambers, when they're not spinning? There was a hint in
a David Brooks column last week (Times Select).

He
asked us to think about what the world could look like 50 years from
now, with Islamic radicals either controlling the world’s oil supply or
not. “I firmly believe that some day American presidents will be
looking back at this period in time, saying, ‘Thank goodness they saw
the vision,’ ” he said.

This was a private coffee klatch between Bush and some of his pet columnists. Fellow-travellers, ostensibly.

It
hasn't been noted anywhere how succinctly Bush put the issue of oil
into the context of the Iraq war in this quote. Here you have it: the
war is not for oil access next week or next year, but 75 years from now.

Bush
thinks that is more important to our security than energy conservation,
peace, education, health care, technology, you name it. He's willing to
destroy our military for this goal. Note that even the professional oil associations put peak oil 30 years from now. If we haven't gone whole hog for conservation and alternative energy by then, our economy is toast.

An ill economy does not mean
the voters know what you stand for. A war going badly does not mean the
voters know what you stand for. A broken health insurance system does
not mean the voters know what you stand for.

Republicans are all
spin, all the time. Democrats are one pallid slogan a week ("We can do
better"???) and a wan hope that things will get so bad that voters will
vote for change, even if they don't know what that change is.

Democrats
need to convey insight. A slogan based on an insight the voters
recognize as true has the power to shift elections, inspire loyalty,
and drive change.

Democrats also need to be on the attack, all
the time. Relying on the facts, in and of themselves, to make your case
means that you can't attack. Without constantly attacking, you can't
drive the debate. That means your opponent gets to define you.
Democrats get slimed into the loser column all the time.

A slogan should

Convey an insight that voters recognize as true.

Be on the attack

...at the same time. That's important! Don't do one or the other, but both. The slogan isn't
ready until both are accomplished, elegantly and ferociously.

Here is a sample, not the most aggressive, but a good basic.

Substance Not Spin.

Note
this characterizes anything your opponent says as a rejoiner as spin:
he is put on the defensive, where you want him to be. You have declared
yourself as purveyor of substance. Self-definition is powerful! Use it
often, use it aggressively, use it with clarity of purpose. This is a
good baseline slogan because you have prepped the discourse to receive
your proposals and ideas as 'substance'. You have whetted the appetite,
for there will be more to come.